So Newsweek asked a bunch of folks to select one cultural artifact from the past eight years that "exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush." Nobody picked W., thank God--instead, there were votes for a Jeff Koons knickknack ("Much as the Bush administration has waved off an intimacy with Big Oil and professed down-home empathy for regular "folks," Koons likes to pretend that he's not an avatar of irony for billionaire collectors.") and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the long-in-the-writing novel that dropped weeks before September 11, 2001, and which "conjures up a nation kept awake at night by nameless dread."--but a few movies did slip by the guy at the door. Specifically, Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott's re-staging of the Battle of Mogadishu (based on the nonfiction book by Mark Bowden) and Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's road trip through an America that had just started reconsidering whether this all-hail-the-retarded-boy-king business was really the best defense against national decline.
In this context, they do make for an intriguing double bill.
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